For 13 years, Josh Harris’s ownership of the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers has been synonymous with “The Process” — the nickname of the franchise’s long, arduous rebuild that was supposed to transform it from maligned to a championship contender.
That process has been far more accelerated with Harris’s newest team. In only his second season since a Harris-led ownership group bought the NFL’s Washington Commanders for a record sale price of $6.05 billion, the Commanders have gone from owning the league’s second-worst record in 2023 to playing this Sunday for the NFC championship, and a berth in the Super Bowl.
Standing in the Commanders’ path to the Super Bowl? A road game this Sunday in, yes, Philadelphia.
This isn’t the first time Harris’s ownership ties have led to conflicts within Philadelphia. The Eagles and Commanders play in the same NFL division, and split this season’s games at one win apiece. Harris also is part of the group that owns the NHL’s New Jersey Devils, which play in the same division as Philadelphia’s Flyers (which, in turn, share the same arena as the Sixers). Since Harris took over, however, New Jersey and Philadelphia have not faced one another in hockey’s postseason.
Now, some of Sunday’s spotlight onto why the private-equity billionaire’s newest team has so quickly advanced deeper in the playoffs than the Sixers ever have in his decade-plus as owner. Some of it could be owed to the luck of the draft. The Commanders and Sixers each tried to rebuild around a top draft pick. But while center Joel Embiid, the No. 3 pick in the 2014 NBA draft, has struggled to stay healthy and deliver on huge expectations, Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels, the No. 2 selection last spring, has coolly already won his first two road starts in the postseason. Eagles defensive coordinator Vic Fangio told reporters this week that Daniels is “probably” the best rookie quarterback he has ever seen in a decades-long career in the NFL.
But under a headline reading, “Unpopular Sixers owner Josh Harris and his Commanders are coming,” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Marcus Hayes this week criticized Harris for overseeing “the worst trade in Philly history,” questioned his personnel decisions leading the team and the handling of a recent campaign to build a new arena downtown, only to reverse course.
A collision in the NFL playoffs would have seemed unthinkable when a Harris-controlled ownership group officially bought out Dan Snyder in 2023. In the past seven years, the Eagles had won one Super Bowl and advanced to another. Under Snyder, meanwhile, Washington suffered off-field black eyes — a 2022 investigation by a House committee found “that sexual harassment, bullying, and other toxic conduct pervaded the Commanders workplace, perpetuated by a culture of fear instilled by the team’s owner” — and on-field woes, winning just two playoff games since Snyder’s tenure began in 1999.
Behind Daniels, the Commanders have equaled that franchise’s number of playoff wins from the previous quarter-century in the last two weeks. One more win would send the Commanders to the Super Bowl for the first time since 1991.
“This guy’s Sixers teams have never made it out of the second round in increasingly humiliating fashion and now he’s potentially going to the Super Bowl with a Philly rival?” wrote Shamus Clancy in the Philly Voice on Tuesday. “Boos would rain down from Lincoln Financial Field like a biblical plague if there were to be a post-game ceremony on Sunday of Harris celebrating on stage with the TV broadcast crew.”